The History of Mr. Polly

“Hole!” said Mr. Polly, and then for a change, and with greatly increased emphasis: “ ’Ole!” He paused, and then broke out with one of his private and peculiar idioms. “Oh! Beastly Silly Wheeze of a Hole!”

He was sitting on a stile between two threadbare looking fields, and suffering acutely from indigestion.

He suffered from indigestion now nearly every afternoon in his life, but as he lacked introspection he projected the associated discomfort upon the world. Every afternoon he discovered afresh that life as a whole and every aspect of life that presented itself was “beastly.” And this afternoon, lured by the delusive blueness of a sky that was blue because the wind was in the east, he had come out in the hope of snatching something of the joyousness of spring. The mysterious alchemy of mind and body refused, however, to permit any joyousness whatever in the spring.

He had had a little difficulty in finding his cap before he came out. He wanted his cap⁠—the new golf cap⁠—and Mrs. Polly must needs fish out his old soft brown felt hat. “ ’Ere’s your ’at,” she said in a tone of insincere encouragement.

He had been routing among the piled newspapers under the kitchen dresser, and had turned quite hopefully and taken the thing. He put it on. But it didn’t feel right. Nothing felt right. He put a trembling hand upon the crown of the thing and pressed it on his head, and tried it askew to the right and then askew to the left.

Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined his effort to Morrison’s. Then the heart of Polly leapt and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison’s head. Morrison’s head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control⁠—a strangeness, a marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that richly endowed temperament. “Say I can’t dress a window, you thundering old Humbug,” he said, and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It leapt into Polly’s mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly’s mind was concentrated upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with its coat off, shying things headlong.

Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: “Get him out of the window. He’s mad. He’s dangerous. Get him out of the window.”

Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted expletive.

Romance began as a series of small but increasingly vigorous movements on the other side of the wall, then as a voice murmuring, then as a falling of little fragments on the hither side and as ten pink finger tips, scarcely apprehended before Romance became startling and emphatically a leg, remained for a time a fine, slender, actively struggling limb, brown stockinged and wearing a brown toe-worn shoe, and then⁠—. A handsome red-haired girl wearing a short dress of blue linen was sitting astride the wall, panting, considerably disarranged by her climbing, and as yet unaware of Mr. Polly.⁠ ⁠…

His fine instincts made him turn his head away and assume an attitude of negligent contemplation, with his ears and mind alive to every sound behind him.

“Goodness!” said a voice with a sharp note of surprise.

Mr. Polly was on his feet in an instant. “Dear me! Can I be of any assistance?” he said with deferential gallantry.

“I don’t know,” said the young lady, and regarded him calmly with clear blue eyes.

“I didn’t know there was anyone here,” she added.

“Sorry,” said Mr. Polly, “if I am intrudaceous. I didn’t know you didn’t want me to be here.”

She reflected for a moment on the word. “It isn’t that,” she said, surveying him.

“When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for a cat, you know.”

“What, to catch the mice?” said Mrs. Larkins.

“No⁠—sleep in the window. A venerable signor of a cat. Tabby. Cat’s no good if it isn’t tabby. Cat I’m going to have, and a canary! Didn’t think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary singing and⁠—Mrs. Polly.⁠ ⁠…”

“Ello!” said Mrs. Larkins.

“Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly⁠—”

“But who’s Mrs. Polly going to be?” said Mrs. Larkins.

“Figment of the imagination, ma’am,” said Mr. Polly. “Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that’s how it will be, I can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson’s the man for a garden of course,” he said, going off at a tangent, “but I don’t mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments. Fervous digging. Shan’t go in for that sort of garden, ma’am. No! Too much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of ’sturtiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes’ line. Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house.”

It was about two o’clock in the afternoon one hot day in high May when Mr. Polly, unhurrying and serene, came to that broad bend of the river to which the little lawn and garden of the Potwell Inn run down. He stopped at the sight of the place with its deep tiled roof, nestling under big trees⁠—you never get a decently big, decently shaped tree by the seaside⁠—its sign towards the roadway, its sun-blistered green bench and tables, its shapely white windows and its row of upshooting hollyhock plants in the garden. A hedge separated it from a buttercup-yellow meadow, and beyond stood three poplars in a group against the sky, three exceptionally tall, graceful and harmonious poplars. It is hard to say what there was about them that made them so beautiful to Mr. Polly; but they seemed to him to touch a pleasant scene to a distinction almost divine. He remained admiring them for a long time. At last the need for coarser aesthetic satisfactions arose in him.

“Provinder,” he whispered, drawing near to the Inn. “Cold sirloin for choice. And nut-brown brew and wheaten bread.”

The nearer he came to the place the more he liked it. The windows on the ground floor were long and low, and they had pleasing red blinds. The green tables outside were agreeably ringed with memories of former drinks, and an extensive grape vine spread level branches across the whole front of the place.